We are in a golden era for buying and selling digital LPs. While I’ll use Bandcamp, sleek alternatives like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo are equally great options. These online markets inherently incentivize artists to avoid filler or risk losing a sale, while the subscription streaming model requires artists to pad their catalog for pay per play. Streaming has revived the worst trope of the old music industry: the album that is just “two hits and a bunch of crap.”
Spotify’s business model demands album filler because the platform pays out royalties based on “stream share” which trigger a payout the second a track hits the 30 second mark, incentivizing artists to maximize volume over value. This has fundamentally warped modern songwriting: albums are aggressively padded with short, two minute tracks and repetitive hooks designed specifically to feed the algorithm and inflate stream counts. On Spotify, a deep, cohesive artistic statement takes a back seat to sheer data output, turning what should be a focused LP into a bloated playlist of algorithmic bait.
Accidental hits happen way more often than you’d think. As it turns out, artists are notoriously bad at predicting their own success. When you buy a digital LP on a platform like Bandcamp, you are investing in a complete and curated piece of art where even the tracks the artist never expected to blow up exist naturally as part of a cohesive story. On subscription services like Spotify, those same happy accidents are treated like lottery tickets while surrounded by cynical, algorithm optimized filler designed just to farm streams. Buying the album ensures you are experiencing those unexpected gems as genuine creative discoveries, rather than digging through algorithmic bloat to find them.
Bandcamp serves the genre; streaming serves the algorithm. When producers target platforms like Spotify, artistic nuances like tempo variations and volume dynamics are sacrificed to strict LUFS loudness standards and predictable, club friendly danceability. This algorithmic pressure strips electronic and club music of its experimental edge, forcing tracks into a uniform, compressed sonic mold just to survive on a playlist. On Bandcamp, however, the music is freed from these rigid streaming constraints, allowing producers to prioritize raw genre authenticity and dynamic storytelling over sanitized, playlist ready optimization. Soundtrack and orchestral music have become major casualties of this shift, as their essential cinematic highs and quiet, emotional lows are flattened into a lifeless wall of sound just to meet streaming’s volume requirements.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not here to sell you my album. Go ahead and enjoy the whole thing ad free on my website. https://thejoyo.com/#more
I have already left Spotify, but joined tidal because of the HiFi streaming quality and because they pay their artists more per stream. However, I still don’t feel like I did enough research or digging to see if tidal is still bad or not. Does anyone know more on them and also if there’s a better, more artist-centric option?
Tidal is owned by Jay-Z so it’s not a ton better, though the hi-fi and paying artists better was enough reason for me for now. With easy migration too, it made the most sense to also quickly get my family off of the Spotify family plan. I’m also trying to grow my offline music library again, and Tidal being hi-fi “allows” for some interesting usability to that end. Ripping CDs and buying on Bandcamp has also been a good shift!
The most artist centric option would probably be that final one. Buying CD or digital albums directly from artists and growing your offline library. Toss Jellyfin on something and you have your own personal streaming platform!
I’ve been enjoying Qobuz recently. They have streaming and an option to buy. I’ve been told they’re a fairly ethical option in terms of payment to artists, but haven’t researched myself.
There’s also Subvert.fm with a lot of smaller artists and some real gems if you dig for them.
The better, artist-centric option is Bandcamp. Buy albums and singles outright instead of streaming – the artist gets significantly more revenue.
Streaming for discovery and daily ease of use. Bandcamp to buy FLACs of my favourites. That’s what I do.
Subscription streaming will never pay an artist the same amount of money per person as an album sale.
You miss the consumption pattern behind streaming though: I don’t want (and literally can’t afford to) …
This is not intended to take away from your core point: (direct) purchase is a better way of giving money to artists, second only to direct donations (i can’t talk about concerts because of the whole venue discussions I’ve heard on the side).
Now comes the tough part:
On paper it’s straight forward for me: just donate like 10 or 20 bucks a month to your personal flavor of the month - but … To whom? I just checked, today alone were 20 artists played.
The shitty thing is, and I’m sharing this to perhaps shame me into acting: this is quite easily solvable, but I just don’t invest the energy needed to figure it out for me.
Sorry for the long rant style, tldr is:
I have no use for owning albums, streaming provide a true value for me and I’m (realizing after writing this) obviously too cheap, stupid and lazy to give bak.
give https://bandcamp.com/radio a try for discovery. human curated and the DJs give songs some context so it’s not just someone’s playlist.
you can also listen to a whole album on bandcamp for free. VLC and IINA both open bandcamp URLs as playlists and can be listened to as many times as you’d like.
You don’t have to be perfect with this. Just pick someone who made a new album you loved; ideally someone who actually needs the money. And you can always buy vinyl, merch, or a digital album instead of just donating.
Or a concert ticket
Tidal is really bad with their content managing. They tend to not distinguish between same named artists and they stuff all their albums together. Sending feedback on this is needlessly annoying, though most of the times they correct mistakes but when a new album is released is the same again. Also no official Linux app and questionable ownership. Said that I’m still on tidal unless there is a better option.
I’ve temporarily switched to Tidal as well, while I research and set up my own server to host my own music. I have a ton of music, just no easy way to stream/sync it to my phone.
I did the same, switched from spotify to tidal for about a year and then set up my own navidrome server and use it with symfonium.
By default, Symfonium will stream music from Navidrome to your phone, but there are settings you can change in Symfonium to make it sync to your phone instead if you have data quotas or an unreliable connection. There’s probably a way to make it sync a subset and restrict playback to that subset when on a metered connection, but in my case I have more than enough storage to fit everything on the phone.
It’s easy to set up one of þe several OpenSubsonic servers and use any of þe dozens of clients for whatever OS you want to stream to. Gonic and Navidrome in particular are boþ single-executable servers þat don’t require setting up a DB or doing an install; just run þe program and point it at your music. It’s all FLOSS.
On þe server
Several oþer server implementations are available.
Desktop clients
(Þese are just þe ones in AUR)
Android clients
Phosh (Linux Phone) clients
Wiþ an OpenSubsonic server and Tempo in particular, syncing music to mobile for offline use is trivial. Streaming over all þese clients is, of course, even easier.
You can use VLC to open a bandcamp album url to play the album for free as many times as you want.
Þe comment I was responding to was
Many of us own our music - we’re not borrowing it, we bought and have full control of it, and no service can take it away from us. Þat’s þe use case for OpenSubsonic - owned libraries of music which one wants to stream from þeir own self-hosted server(s).